Chapter Two

“I am real, you contrary little minx,” he murmured into the mirror, narrowing his eyes, frowning as she buried her face against her knees. Why was she so sad now, his little angel? His time with her was bitterly short, and it had been nearly six months since he had seen her and the little one last, just a few days after she had broken her union with that bastard who was so unworthy of her.

Nikolai shook his head and pulled himself away from the mirror, away from the woman who had pulled him for years. So much to be done. Christmas was only a month away, and he had much to do, they all did.

He did not have the time to sit around and yearn for the sloe eyed minx that had haunted him for years.

Rhys would love to see him now, yearning and sighing after a young mortal he could never have. Just another thing to make him even more melancholy, another mark against him, in the eyes of the Council. Rhys was unmated as well, but at least he was not a somber, unsmiling bastard, as he so often pointed out to Nikolai.

With a grim sigh, Nikolai turned away from the mirror and focused on the task at head. Work. There was work to be done.

* * * * *

One Year Later

Gone...

Missing...

Every mother's worst nightmare, and Chelly was living it. Nate hadn't returned Bryan from his visitation. Had, in fact, absconded with him, with his new fiancée, clearing out their house, and fleeing the state. Chelly paced the living room as cops and federal people surrounded her, talking around her and through her, but rarely to her.

She jumped every time the phone rang, and slept only in stops and starts. With shaking hands, last week she had flushed her medicines down the toilet. Medicines she hadn't needed--she wasn't depressed and she wasn’t suffering from hallucinations or delusions. Her headaches still plagued her and would take a while to go away, but she would no long pretend that she was delusional and needed medicines just to keep her ex-husband happy. Hell, he taken Bryan away from anyway.

As she paced the room on the eighth day of Bryan's kidnapping, she grew aware of how quiet the room had fallen. Slowly, she turned and met Agent McKiernan's faded grey eyes, set in his tired face. He gazed at her from across the room as he crossed over to meet her, and she realized he held his cell phone. Cell phone...

She pulled her eyes away from it and started to back away.

No.

“Chelly...they've found your ex-husband and his fiancee. And your son...”

* * * * *

Her pain was tearing at him.

Nikolai felt it in his heart like a great ripping beast.

It was her need that pulled him, her hunger, her wishes. More often than not, she merely pulled his consciousness into her dreams, and he would try to soothe whatever troubled her.

Oft times, her misery was great–she took on much and she did too little for herself, ignored her own heart, her desires, her needs. Ahh, there would be no simple soothing this time, Nikolai knew. Staring through the mirror, he studied the child. Bryan, a happy, rather astounding child, he knew. And he lay fighting for his life. Mortal bodies were so frail. An old scar, very old, low on his belly, was proof of that. Nikolai had been mortal...once.

A wounded child, grievously wounded, in Russia nearly thousand years ago, he had been hunting with his father at the age of nine. His father hadn’t survived the thieves attack on their camp. Nikolai wouldn’t have. But Alisdair had come upon them, that wintry frozen night as he lay bleeding to death from the ragged knife wound low in his belly, still clutching the knife he had used on one of the thieves as he tried to protect his father’s fallen body.

Da. Mortal bodies were frail.

Chantelle lay with her head down on the bed linens on the narrow hospital bed sobbing.

The boy was still young enough...he could be made elf-kin.

But the mother...that option simply wasn't there.

And she wasn't likely to forgive him easily either.

He waited until she had fallen to her sleep. She was weary--once sleep held her in its bond, there was no waking for her, but he brushed his mind to hers and whispered of sleep just to be certain. Then Nikolai went to the boy and hunkered down beside him, cupping his face and easing inside his mind. Ahhh...the pain...so young to feel such pain...

He felt the boy's sudden jerk, his startlement as he recognized a phantom touch in his mind. Then his fear...”Do not be afraid, boy, I come to give good thing,” he whispered. “To take this kind of pain away for ever and ever.”

“Nonononononono....Mama!”

In reality, the boy did was whimper, but it was enough. Wrapping his arms tight around the child, Nikolai opened his eyes, a flash of moonlight falling across his eyes as he stared at Chelly just as she woke. “No more pain, Bryan, I promise.”

* * * * *

Chelly awoke to see a familiar, glowing pair of eyes... dreamy, soft and blue...awash with light, the face in shadow...as a man lifted Bryan, still hooked up to various machines and monitors. And they were gone, before she could even draw in the breath ask who in the hell he was.

But she didn’t need to.

Chelly knew those eyes. They haunted her dreams, both sleeping and waking.

Nikolai...

The soft husky voice rolled through her mind even as she opened her mouth to scream as nurses came running in. Shooting up out of her chair, she filled the room with lights and whirled around, staring at the room. He was gone. Well and truly gone. Not out the window, or the door, just gone. Her breath left her lungs in a shuddering gasp and her teeth were chattering as she stared at the nurses who started to ask where the boy had gone.

And she had to whisper... “I don't know...”

But then she got mad and whirled on the nurses. “How can somebody just come in here and take a child while their mom is sleeping? Where is my son?” Not that anybody had any answers...save for one man, a man whose face and memory she had drowned out with pills and will for a year.

Stalking into the room, she went to the small bathroom and splashed water on her face, dragged her hands through her hair. She glared at her reflection and leaned closer to whisper, “Nikolai, where is my son?”